JM, l'escalier d'Enfer: Radio Walk, Franklin Hills, 11.28.07
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Thursday, November 29, 2007
l'escalier d'Enfer
JM, l'escalier d'Enfer: Radio Walk, Franklin Hills, 11.28.07
click image to enlarge
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Bibliophobes
While researching something or other in a library the other day, I noted how the institution of the public library has become mostly an Internet cafe without the espresso.
At Glendale's Central Library, there is a mad rush every morning on opening to sign up for a computer. At LA's Central, same story. Glendale Central has about 20 Internet computers, LA Central over 60, and they all are booked on opening, immediately.
I too rely on Internet connections during the day when I'm in a library. But rarely for more than fifteen minutes at a time. People seem to be spending enormous parts of their days at terminals.
Last night I was telling Lynn how, when I needed to look at an old Times article on microfilm, I chose Glendale, because there is such easy access to microfilm, and nobody is using the readers most of the time. The aisles of books are mostly bereft of patrons too. It makes research very easy when no library books are ever checked out.
Note: in other countries, you can buy beer and wine at most Internet cafes. Not this one, for some reason.
At Glendale's Central Library, there is a mad rush every morning on opening to sign up for a computer. At LA's Central, same story. Glendale Central has about 20 Internet computers, LA Central over 60, and they all are booked on opening, immediately.
I too rely on Internet connections during the day when I'm in a library. But rarely for more than fifteen minutes at a time. People seem to be spending enormous parts of their days at terminals.
Last night I was telling Lynn how, when I needed to look at an old Times article on microfilm, I chose Glendale, because there is such easy access to microfilm, and nobody is using the readers most of the time. The aisles of books are mostly bereft of patrons too. It makes research very easy when no library books are ever checked out.
Note: in other countries, you can buy beer and wine at most Internet cafes. Not this one, for some reason.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Simmel
I have been reading two books by Georg Simmel this past week.
The book that has most captivated me thus far has been The Philosophy of Money.
Simmel is not mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus save in one footnoote, and he's not in Anti-Oedipus at all, but it is plain that he is a key rhizome in the root system that fed these works. His discussion of how money is equally pinned and not pinned to a specific value, and why this is so, is very convincing. In that way, he comes very close in The Philosophy of Money to calling capital a body without organs, which Deleuze and Guattari later did.
His overriding theme in this and other works is to take a look at an organization and demonstrate how it works first to liberate, then to enslave.
Lynn and I had a little discussion about it...if at the turn of the old century it was money that once liberated and that later enslaved, thus far in this new century it's technology that once liberated and then enslaved. It's happening in our lifetime and it's not just silicon and the computer, it's also the cell, DNA, healthcare.
Through Simmel, it's easier to figure out how despite "progress" people have only worked harder all the time in our lifetimes, and mostly try to shame each other through comments on either having too little money or working too little.
The introductions to the two books I have make clear that Simmel knew he would remain both largely unknown and important nonetheless.
For a long time, I couldn't believe the number of people I encounter in Los Angeles who equate writing and especially reading and thinking with doing nothing. Thanks to Simmel, at least I can see a little better why this might be so.
The book that has most captivated me thus far has been The Philosophy of Money.
Simmel is not mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus save in one footnoote, and he's not in Anti-Oedipus at all, but it is plain that he is a key rhizome in the root system that fed these works. His discussion of how money is equally pinned and not pinned to a specific value, and why this is so, is very convincing. In that way, he comes very close in The Philosophy of Money to calling capital a body without organs, which Deleuze and Guattari later did.
His overriding theme in this and other works is to take a look at an organization and demonstrate how it works first to liberate, then to enslave.
Lynn and I had a little discussion about it...if at the turn of the old century it was money that once liberated and that later enslaved, thus far in this new century it's technology that once liberated and then enslaved. It's happening in our lifetime and it's not just silicon and the computer, it's also the cell, DNA, healthcare.
Through Simmel, it's easier to figure out how despite "progress" people have only worked harder all the time in our lifetimes, and mostly try to shame each other through comments on either having too little money or working too little.
The introductions to the two books I have make clear that Simmel knew he would remain both largely unknown and important nonetheless.
For a long time, I couldn't believe the number of people I encounter in Los Angeles who equate writing and especially reading and thinking with doing nothing. Thanks to Simmel, at least I can see a little better why this might be so.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
le flâneur
~
Two days ago, after I had confessed to not writing any fiction of late, an acquaintance wished me to get more in touch with my inner flâneur. My first thought was, "What can he mean? That I am not outwardly flâneur as well?" But my second thought went something like this: Not many have much leisure time to experience the City aimlessly; that is why it also seems to so many people that the novel is mostly dead.
Lynn, now at home with some leisure time on her hands, is reading novel after novel. Lisa Exit, who often leads a flâneur life as well (not this semester, though), and who loaned Lynn many of books she has enjoyed, is the only other person in my circle who habitually reads novels without feeling it incumbent to write one.
It's funny: we say nobody reads, yet when we learn someone is convalescing, it's mostly books we give .
I've noted the kind of books Lynn's received. They are either great or awful. Nobody seems to give the convalescent an ordinary book.
Some people give a healing person bright shiny new books---books that they've freshly bought for them, probably without having them read themselves. These are mostly awful.
Also, a subset of these, a few small-minded, awful people---people from white-flight Christian suburbs, who feel that not even chemotherapy is reason enough to stop judging and moralizing---give shiny new books that are not only awful but also presumptuous and even vicious. The implied message is, "Here's why you and not me are sick---you never came around to my view of the world---that's why you're being punished with your illness, and here's what you should do about it." (They usually follow up with a call: "Did you read that Chapter Eight?")
And still others give a healing person not a shiny new book at all; they give a used book that they've read and enjoyed themselves.
The used books are the ones that get read; they're not only livelier and funnier, but they're far less presumptuous, judgmental, awful.
It is well known that the novel is a product, or perhaps an adjunct, of the rise of leisure time. Now that so few people in the City (and even fewer, mercifully, in the suburbs) have much leisure time, the novel is seen as mostly dead---a point the discussion centering around the death of Mailer necessarily devolved towards. But it's really not. It's just dead to the people whose lives are so busy that they can only give to the healing bright shiny new books they haven't read themselves.
~
Two days ago, after I had confessed to not writing any fiction of late, an acquaintance wished me to get more in touch with my inner flâneur. My first thought was, "What can he mean? That I am not outwardly flâneur as well?" But my second thought went something like this: Not many have much leisure time to experience the City aimlessly; that is why it also seems to so many people that the novel is mostly dead.
° ° ° ° °
Lynn, now at home with some leisure time on her hands, is reading novel after novel. Lisa Exit, who often leads a flâneur life as well (not this semester, though), and who loaned Lynn many of books she has enjoyed, is the only other person in my circle who habitually reads novels without feeling it incumbent to write one.
It's funny: we say nobody reads, yet when we learn someone is convalescing, it's mostly books we give .
° ° ° ° °
I've noted the kind of books Lynn's received. They are either great or awful. Nobody seems to give the convalescent an ordinary book.
Some people give a healing person bright shiny new books---books that they've freshly bought for them, probably without having them read themselves. These are mostly awful.
Also, a subset of these, a few small-minded, awful people---people from white-flight Christian suburbs, who feel that not even chemotherapy is reason enough to stop judging and moralizing---give shiny new books that are not only awful but also presumptuous and even vicious. The implied message is, "Here's why you and not me are sick---you never came around to my view of the world---that's why you're being punished with your illness, and here's what you should do about it." (They usually follow up with a call: "Did you read that Chapter Eight?")
And still others give a healing person not a shiny new book at all; they give a used book that they've read and enjoyed themselves.
The used books are the ones that get read; they're not only livelier and funnier, but they're far less presumptuous, judgmental, awful.
° ° ° ° °
It is well known that the novel is a product, or perhaps an adjunct, of the rise of leisure time. Now that so few people in the City (and even fewer, mercifully, in the suburbs) have much leisure time, the novel is seen as mostly dead---a point the discussion centering around the death of Mailer necessarily devolved towards. But it's really not. It's just dead to the people whose lives are so busy that they can only give to the healing bright shiny new books they haven't read themselves.
~
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Mailer
Reading some responses to the death of Norman Mailer, I formed a few thoughts of my own. One is that there is no special virtue in outliving your enemies. Both Mailer and Gore Vidal have lived long enough that their whole world has just about completely disappeared.
Recalling some words I quoted of Vidal's this past summer:
The politics, sex, class of the author are all-important while the book at hand is simply an excuse to discuss, say, the anti-Semitism of Pound, the homosexuality of Whitman, the social climbing of James. Since the American character is especially tendentious and sectarian, the American critic must decide in advance whether or not the writer he is writing about is a Good Person; that is, one who accepts implicitly all the going superstitions (a.k.a values [sic]) of the middle class of the day. If the writer is a Good Person, then what he writes is apt to be good. If he is a Bad Person, forget it.Good God, the LA Times' piece was such a very sad exemplar of this. "[T]he literary world was not just mourning him but also grappling with his complicated legacy." In other words, as Mailer was a Bad Person, at his death people don't seem to know what to say, and they're not about to do something so rash as, say, revisit his work, or even let it stand up for itself. Mailer's death was an excuse to discuss Mailer the bad person, not Mailer's text.
I have been thinking about Mailer a lot this past year. Something about his overtly male blutlust repulsed but also haunted me. In May, I noted how The Naked and the Dead was not for me. And yet I also said that readers here would be better off reading The Naked and the Dead than most any blog. I'll still own that position.
° ° ° ° °
One thing I've been aware of all my adult life: by virtue of my last name, should I get a book into a library or two, there it will be: right in front of Mailer's. It's a fact that at once creeps me out a little---and pleases me a lot.
Mailer for me is, first and foremost, the supreme American exemplar of a writer's ability to endure when necessary---as it was so often necessary for him---personal awfulness as an adjunct of creativity. In its best practice, writing doesn't skim along on an ever even, bourgeois keel; it's a harrowing navigation of storm after storm, navigated with the support of whomever can help, be they awe-inspiring angels or utterly awful demons.
~
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
You ran for her
The list grew all through the week. Sedra, Ted Haigh, Margaret, Dan Zukowski, Julia and Jon Regardie, Barbara Delvak, Barbara Barisic, my cousin Myrna, Stephanie, Rod and Ruth, Ted Gioia, Madge, Dave, Patti, Will, Scott, John Shannon, Maria, Sheryl, and Philip; also Sharon, Susan and other Sharon from Hawthorne High, and a very generous anonymous donor from MayorSam. Thanks so much for raising money for one of the best causes going in town: run for her, the third annual women's cancer event organized in conjunction with healthcare superstars at Cedars Sinai, UCLA and elsewhere. You sponsored Lynn and me for over $1250 and more is coming in. We are so honored.
Lynn didn't make it to the event because tomorrow is her second chemo treatment and it was damn cold this morning and she didn't want to risk a cold. But I brought the run for her shirt home and Lynn modeled it right away. "Call it 'Week Three" she said. So there it is. "Week Three."
Lynn wants everyone to know how much she appreciates their contributions and especially for helping to raise awareness about ovarian cancer, which strikes a shocking percentage of American women at some point in their lives (the risk is even higher for certain demographic groups).
All you have to do is read some of the personal stories of women at this event---so many women, even those under good medical care, are diagnosed in a later stage. But it's a tough fight for women in every stage, and far more research and public awareness is needed. The people behind run for her are associated with some of the top research and statistical people in the field of women's cancer; donations go to research and raising awareness.
More photos follow. Click on any to enlarge.
Stephanie joined me for the event, spending a good part of her birthday at run for her in support of Lynn. Spending your birthday at a women's cancer benefit---what a mitzvah for all of us! Lynn gave me a flourless chocolate cake for Steph, for just before the event, and we lit a little candle.
The scene behind the starting line; runners first and walkers next. Steph and I were much further back in the crowd than she and Lynn and I were for Patti Smith a couple of months ago. I'm guessing over 1,000 walkers; I was number 900, and I registered eight days ago.
I never learned this woman's name; she was on Oxygen, even on her cruiser, even in fifty-something degree weather. But I loved loved loved her LA Sparks gear and flags and stickers and spirit. We'll see you again next year!
Lynn didn't make it to the event because tomorrow is her second chemo treatment and it was damn cold this morning and she didn't want to risk a cold. But I brought the run for her shirt home and Lynn modeled it right away. "Call it 'Week Three" she said. So there it is. "Week Three."Lynn wants everyone to know how much she appreciates their contributions and especially for helping to raise awareness about ovarian cancer, which strikes a shocking percentage of American women at some point in their lives (the risk is even higher for certain demographic groups).
All you have to do is read some of the personal stories of women at this event---so many women, even those under good medical care, are diagnosed in a later stage. But it's a tough fight for women in every stage, and far more research and public awareness is needed. The people behind run for her are associated with some of the top research and statistical people in the field of women's cancer; donations go to research and raising awareness.
More photos follow. Click on any to enlarge.
Stephanie joined me for the event, spending a good part of her birthday at run for her in support of Lynn. Spending your birthday at a women's cancer benefit---what a mitzvah for all of us! Lynn gave me a flourless chocolate cake for Steph, for just before the event, and we lit a little candle.
The scene behind the starting line; runners first and walkers next. Steph and I were much further back in the crowd than she and Lynn and I were for Patti Smith a couple of months ago. I'm guessing over 1,000 walkers; I was number 900, and I registered eight days ago.
I never learned this woman's name; she was on Oxygen, even on her cruiser, even in fifty-something degree weather. But I loved loved loved her LA Sparks gear and flags and stickers and spirit. We'll see you again next year!
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Outlet
JM, Outlet, 11.07.07
With one day to go, my fundraising, which I am not at all good at, hasn't gone too badly. I feel plugged in. It's been a great outlet, this event, maybe the best possible one.
I've had a measure of success at this only because people are far better at giving than I am at inspiring.
All those people who have sponsored me for run for her are so so beautiful. They include some readers, devoted and occasional, people such as Sedra, Ted Haigh, Margaret, Dan Zukowski, my cousin Myrna, Stephanie, Rod and Ruth, Madge, Dave, Patti, Will, Scott, John Shannon, Maria, Sheryl, and Philip; also Sharon, Susan and other Sharon from Hawthorne High circa 19ahem. I've tried to thank everyone, but really, I don't know how to thank everyone enough at all. Click their links. Buy their books. Spring for their drinks. Kiss them.
Other things have also gone very well at home between and even during cooking, gin rummy, House, M.D. episodes, and album changes. Best to everyone---the very best to everyone.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
Thursday, November 1, 2007
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